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Low-ranked female monkeys band together against their leaders

It would be easier to climb up the hierarchy with some help from your friends

TAO Images Limited/Alamy Stock Photo

By Aylin Woodward

If you’re trying to overthrow the boss, you might need a friend to back you up. The same is true for female macaques, who need allies to resist authority and take down more powerful members of the group.

Most primates have social hierarchies in which some individuals are dominant over the others. For rhesus macaques, these strict hierarchies are organised around female relationships.

Lower-ranked females have little social mobility and must silently bare their teeth to higher-ranked females. The signal means “I want you to know that I know that you out-rank me” and is important in communicating social rank, says Darcy Hannibal at the University of California, Davis. “They are ‘bending the knee’.”

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But Hannibal and her colleagues have discovered that subordinate females can override the status quo.

To do this, female macaques form alliances with family, friends or both. These alliances help females maintain or increase their social rank and compete for resources. A female who wants to challenge those higher up needs this help, says Hannibal.

Take the power back

To find out what factors affect the rate of insubordination, the team studied 357 captive adult females, who experienced almost 11,000 conflicts.

Insubordination events were more likely if the lower-ranked female was older. They were most likely if the subordinate outweighed the dominant female by 7 kilograms and the dominant female had no family allies. The more allies the subordinate female had, and the more days her mother was present in the group, the more often she would exhibit insubordinate behaviour.

While having the support of friends and family was critical for a subordinate female to rebel, the number of friends didn’t matter for dominant females. “It may be that simply holding the dominant position provides a sort of ‘possession’ advantage,” says Hannibal.

However, Dario Maestripieri at the University of Chicago, Illinois says the team found an awful lot of insubordination in a two-year period. He says their definition of the term might be too broad and that they have lumped a lot of distinct behaviours together.

Maestripieri says true insubordination is calculated aggression with the goal of changing one’s status. Such overthrow events – where entire families revolt against their superiors with the intent to kill – are rare.